Conference

Intersection | Prospect Heights returns this month with a panel discussion and series of tours to launch Our Places, a new booklet presenting stories and concerns of current and former neighbors, tracking development and demographic change, and looking at how it plays out on our streets. What is the future of Prospect Heights and our city?

Talking with organizers, politicians and planners about the experience of change in Prospect Heights, and what it implies for neighborhoods across the city facing large-scale development. How do we preserve community?

Guided tours : June 11 & June 18
Meet @ Met Food, 632 Vanderbilt Ave., between Park Place & Prospect Place
Join us for creative walking tours telling the new and old Intersection stories in sites around the neighborhood. How these are similar or different to your own stories?

In October, I had the pleasure of opening the TRANSlocacions conference hosted by Idensitat ID and Arts Santa Monica in Barcelona. My talk, on my ongoing Layered SPURA project, focused on the ways in which we can understand some of the complexities and controversies of the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area by understanding the different ways that people have moved through this site of 40-year-old urban renewal and recent gentrification – as visitors, immigrants, tourists, and even conquerors.

In particular, I talked about the need to reframe students’ roles in a “community engagement” project such as this – to make sure that our collaborations with our community partners were in fact mutually determined and mutually beneficial, and to ensure that my students, most of whom have no personal connection to the area, are practicing a kind of productive, rather than consumptive, visiting when engaging with SPURA and its multiple communities.

It was a great pleasure to talk with colleagues from Barcelona afterward, and to hear that my concerns, and practices, resonated with their own. In particular, it was fascinating to hear how the painful histories of a small section of the Lower East Side could resonate so deeply with people working in collaboration with the residents of the Raval, a small neighborhood of Barcelona just behind the location of our conference at Arts Santa Monica. There, my colleagues noted, gentrification and displacement did not come from one large-scale redevelopment effort by private real estate, but rather, had been spurred by large-scale development by cultural and state institutions – museums and universities. This insight makes clear the great need for nuanced thinking about power, particularly in the heady, popular, and sometimes over-lauded relationship between universities and communities.

One colleague explained the challenges of the Raval, and more generally the pitfalls of non-critical collaborative relationships involving universities, by saying, “We call them the three tenors [the university, the museum, and the art center], because they’re so busy singing loudly, no one else can get a word in edgewise.”

Join us this weekend at the Visible Evidence conference! We’ll be speaking on August 13, at the day-long workshop at Hunter College : The City and the Expanded Documentary.

It will be a great day, and we’re looking forward to our panel, “The Urban Documentary, New Forms for New Cities” in which we’ll be talking about the new ways that our recent project, The Triangle Fire Open Archive, explores new ways to know the city and its history – through unconventional archives, visual urbanist approaches, and creative forms of participation. In particular, we’ll be talking about some of the newest objects and stories about the 1982 Chinatown garment workers strike (one of these, above) – and the way gathering these objects in the context of the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire tells a complex story about the city.

The urban documentary has taken new life formally and socially as concepts move away from origins in ‘single channel’ form to a broad variety of new lives in locative media contexts, including GPS triggered audio and video, web-based media from issue-based blogs, to games, to social mapping. Sometimes these are projects initiated by filmmakers, at other times, they are framed by architects, urban planners and organizers. What do these new practices look like? What is their justification? What happens to documentary notions on these new platforms where the boundaries between subject, maker and location shift? This workshop is designed as an introduction to some of these practices in a form useful both to makers and theorists.

Our 2010 Urban Encounters festival at Tate Britain this past June was a great success, and I thought it worthwhile to reflect on our intentions for this year’s event.

This organization, co-founded by myself and Paul Halliday, and now a Buscada project as well, addresses the dialogue and practice of visual urbanism.

This year’s main event, Urban Encounters: Routes and Transitions at Tate Britain on 29 May 2010, was inspired by the multiple meanings of these words : routes and transitions. All of the talks will soon be available for download and listening on iTunes U through Tate Britain, but meanwhile, a short explanation of the intentions an interests behind this year’s main event.

We were particularly interested in both embodied local routes, as well as global flows and the individuals who experience both of these kinds of movements through space – as well as through time.

The other part of this theme – transitions – was been inspired by our interest in change – and its relationship to the city, as well as the city-dweller. What does a still (or even a moving yet finite) visual medium have to say about change? about the change of landscapes? the change or transitions or adaptations made by people themselves, traveling these global and local routes in the processes of migration and life otherwise? Are there traces that can be found, or new geographies made through the visual?

The panels addressed these routes and transitions through three major themes –

Global Routes: Personal & political addressed global routes / global flows of capital, colonialism and war, as they intersect with personal routes and connections through space and time.

Making Transitions: Practice & location considered the ways in which migrants and migrant stories inhabit, and create, locations – from front rooms to municipal buildings, housing developments or the space of radio waves. This panel asked how the process of “making space” is a part of the movement between nations and neighborhoods?

The Remembered Road: Archives & pasts explored the way in which archives from the official to the personal can be read, re-read, or reinterpreted, to find the traces of different kinds of migrant, and mobile, histories – and to understand cities’ multiple pasts.

There are some enormous questions here, and some thrilling answers and provocations were posed by our speakers’ work.

Yet, a mix of dialogue and practice is at the heart of Urban Encounters – we encourage dialogue amongst our panelists as well as with our audience. In building the field of visual urbanism and we hope that you will engage in a dialogue with us. I hope that those of you who were not able to join us at the event will listen to the podcast when it becomes available – and for those that were able to join us at this or past years, please get in touch to continue the dialogue here, via facebook, twitter, or email at info [at] urbanencounters.org.

Gabrielle (principal of Buscada) is co-founder of Urban Encounters, a project on the dialogue and practice of visual urbanism. The Urban Encounters conference is now in its 3rd year. This year’s event takes place May 29, 2010 at Tate Britain.

Buscada collaborates with Urban Encounters to curate, participate, organize and publicize the event through multiple media.

Urban Encounters: Routes and Transitions explores the dialogue and practice of visual urbanism to bring together international researchers, academics, photographers and artists concerned with the transitional nature of contemporary urban space. It will be of particular relevance to those engaged with urban image-making, analysis and research. This third annual conference will address how photographic practices and archives intersect with an understanding of local and global routes as “places”, considering the temporality of place and the cross-cultural juxtaposition of locales.

This conference approaches the city as a palimpsest of routes and its panels will consider local, global and remembered routes through film, photography and other visual urbanisms. Considering the cultural geographies of migration, change, place, identity and the process of making transitions, the conference will facilitate an on-going interdisciplinary dialogue about the growing field of urban visual practice, method and enquiry.

This symposium is the center of the Urban Encounters Festival, which takes place in several UK-based and international locations this spring, including the London-based galleries Photofusion and Viewfinder, and at the events Urban Encounters: City to Sea at Bognor Regis, UK and Urban Encounters at the Festival of the Image, Manizales, Colombia.

Keynote speaker: Camilo Vergara, photographer

Speakers:

Michael Keith, Oxford University
Yazan Khalili, Goldsmiths, University of London
Nirmal Puwar, Goldsmiths, University of London
Kuldip Powar, independent filmmaker
Suki Ali, London School of Economics
Manuel Vazquez, Independent photographer
Michael McMillan, independent curator
Joseph Heathcott, The New School
Lasse Johansson, Fugitive Images

Discussants:

Paul Goodwin, Tate Britain

Caroline Knowles, Goldsmiths, University of London

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, Urban Encounters co-founder / The New School

Paul Halliday, Urban Encounters co-founder / Goldsmiths, University of London

I just returned from the Digital Hollywood conference in Santa Monica, CA, I talked on a panel which was trying to understand how to best leverage video archives and assets for both large media companies and smaller non-profits.

I showed the PBS video platform on which I was the design lead. I discussed how the new tools we developed give PBS access to their own rich archive, and allow them to program in a new way online. These online video platforms in effect allow PBS to return to being true network producers: categorizing shows by content topics, not by the time-slots of linear TV. They are now able to create new channels of content by combining new and old shows with valuable web content for context.

New Model for video online

Step 1: Inputs

Archival video

New video productions

Live / Social web video

Step 2: Curation mechanisms and tools

Automated meta-tags

Editorial tools

Step 3 : New video Streams collections created

Topic-based

Editorial

Geo-tagged

Date-based

Author-grouped

Program-based

Step 4: Feedback loop

This model allows for easier access for the consumers of video, and allows companies who created video based content new and creative was of automatically and editorially creating new streams of video. Archival video juxtaposed with new and social web video to create new and unique video streams.

The highlights from the panel

Broadcasters are now broadcasting full episodes with much success and reaching new audience instead of cannibalizing old ones.

On the panel, a member of the South Park production company shared some really interesting insights about how their viewers watch South Park online. He explained that full episodes are a big hit online, and that people watch all seasons equally, so it is not just catch-up TV.

A 12-year-old today did not watch Season 1 when it first aired, so it is now new to them. This is a phenomenon of long term video archives: a stream of younger viewers discover content for the first time, while other viewers tune in for nostalgia.

Digital Hollywood is on multiple times a year at different locations.

Find out more at: get URL :http://www.digitalhollywood.com/

I just returned from the Digital Hollywood conference in Santa Monica, CA, I talked on a panel which was trying to understand how to best leverage video archives and assets for both large media companies and smaller non-profits.

I showed the PBS video platform on which I was the design lead. I discussed how the new tools we developed give PBS access to their own rich archive, and allow them to program in a new way online. These online video platforms in effect allow PBS to return to being true network producers: categorizing shows by content topics, not by the time-slots of linear TV. They are now able to create new channels of content by combining new and old shows with valuable web content for context.